Strange News: Ayn Rand & Daily Wire
Saw this in the headlines:
EXCLUSIVE: Conservative media firm The Daily Wire has optioned exclusive film and TV series rights to develop and produce an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s dystopian 1957 novel ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ the author’s most heralded work
Not sure how, or if, the conservative-leaning Daily Wire will treat with the Gospel of the Libertarians, but if they make a good effort, the results will be fascinating.
I have always had an odd relation to ATLAS SHRUGGED, since I was too old when first I read it for the lure of a simple philosophy to overwhelm me, but I was allured by the author’s rigorously consistent Aristotelianism, and her boldness at making a moral argument in favor of Capitalism, not merely an Adam Smithian argument that free trade is more efficient than expropriation and rationing.
Her stance toward Capitalism as the sole economic system consistent with freedom and honor, reason and moral goodness, should have been the commonplace refrain of every American or freedom-loving European in the world, and all should have been ready to fling such words unapologetically in the in the face of tribal, pagan, and oriental notions of collectivism, communism, fascism, theosophy, every other flowering bloom of the Twentieth Century meant to demean individual rights. That so few in her generation made the moral case for freedom is odd indeed.
After recovering from a desperate case of Libertarianism, and growing into a somewhat less jejune worldview, my love for the book did not turn to hatred, as it so often does when one’s idols turn out to be frauds and fools.
In this case, I was not an idolater — but alas I was an atheist, hence had no natural immunity to Ayn Rand’s passionate and rhetorical appeals to logic and reason.
I was also lured, as might be many a young man, by so likely an excuse for sexual libertinism, which seems always to accompany so-called classical liberals. I have yet to meet a puritanical libertarian.
So I see the flaws in her philosophy, and see the self-imposed tragedy of her life created by using that philosophy to excuse sins like adultery. But I still see and admire the artistic genius of her book, despite its shortcomings.
Nonetheless, the book is very well constructed, perhaps the best constructed I have ever seen: which is remarkable considering its overall length and the ambition of its theme.
Ayn Rand had her own theory of aesthetics, her own theory of how literature should be written, and she wrote her own book according to those strictures, which is an amazing accomplishment both for a novelist and for a philosopher.
She is the sole modern philosopher worthy of the name. All others I have read merit the name of anti-philosopher.
There are those who find her prose turgid or her lengthy speeches unreadable. I am not one of those. As an artist, I find it fascinating to see a work where every word and every image, without a single iota out of place, is directed toward the thematic and dramatic point of the novel. She does not wax lyrical, but follows the modernistic Hemmingway school of writing. Even her use of metaphors is polemical.
But the whole edifice is mansion of surpassing architectural genius built on sand, and the first storm of skepticism, of balanced thought, of pragmatic application to the real world, washes the golden towers of vanity into a collapsed wreckage.
To live as reason rather than passion directs is a noble sentiment, and to live with honor and integrity likewise. But she does not have the honesty of the Roman Stoic or the Great Souled Man of Aristotle, because Ayn Rand is not willing to follow her philosophy to its ultimate logical conclusion:
In a mortal world, all things die, so the survival instinct cannot be the sole source the good nor its ultimate aim. Nor is survival at any cost allowed in her moral system, but neither is there any enunciation of any higher principles to justify fidelity to causes or to loves greater than self-love or self-survival.
Objectivism driven to his ultimate conclusion would either be a form of Stoicism, (which were the type of men the author clearly much admired) but which holds honor higher than life, or a form of Eudaemonism or Hedonism, holding pleasures either temperate or intemperate as the highest good, with all the melancholy futility that entails.
One need not adhere to a novelist’s philosophy to enjoy her muse, especially, as here, where the muse is smarter than the novelist.
The novel concerns an epic and eerie mystery, where an unknown power is destroying civilization, and shutting down the motors of the world. A mysterious conspiracy of disappearing industrialists, artists, intellectuals, composers, oil barons, use the symbol of the Dollar Sign as their heraldry. And one ambitious female railroad executive, seeing the decay, seeks to preserve her company from ruin, and to find the man behind the conspiracy. Who is John Galt?
I can see how the tale is not to everyone’s taste, but I cannot understand the mockery heaped on it by folk who consider the antic word-clown James Joyce to be profound.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
